Acadia

Acadia

Acadia Web Design + Content Strategy

Come Home To
Life in Balance.

Acadia

Brand Strategy

Web Design

Content Strategy

Content Direction

Overview

Acadia is an expertly master planned community with an even more incredible developer. The Acadia Community is truly a masterpiece and has become the Upstate’s premiere master planned community. With 2 miles of Saluda River frontage, over a third of Acadia’s 350 acres have been preserved for green space, parks, trails & common areas. Acadia is a private oasis, an escape from the hustle & bustle, and only minutes from downtown. Six stop lights from downtown Greenville and an even shorter distance to Greenville Hospital System’s main campus, Acadia is part of the newly announced IMED (http://rdc.ghs.org/imed/) corridor in Greenville. From the pool house, river house, paddle house, tennis courts, community gardens, and a brand new chapel on the way, this community has everything. Pricing is conservative from smaller but luxurious cottage homes to large footprint estate homes.

Challenge

Acadia approached us to design a new marketing platform for their community. Their outdated website had become an information dump, not a marketing tool. It was clunky and difficult to update, so the marketing team had turned to their off-site blog to add all new content. Acadia has a well-defined brand, and they know who they are and who they want to target. Their internal marketing team had been successfully using a television media strategy to bring in homeowners, and their sales process was defined. They needed a full-featured custom website that reflected the same goals and vision.

Strategy + Design

Brand Strategy

Through our discovery phase, Acadia had a pretty clear, unified picture of their unique value proposition and their brand values. Rich, descriptive language poured out of them when we asked questions like, “What do you do better than anyone else?” or “What is your mission?” We helped them simplify this into two brand pillars, “Balance” and “Community”.

Acadia balances diversity in the families who live there, with young couples to retirees, families to empty-nesters. Acadia offers a balanced lifestyle with their proximity to the city combined with a secluded feeling of escape and their many amenities and conveniences. Joined with the unprecedented amount of preserved green space and trails. We highlighted these ideas with a marketing tagline “Life in balance.” We added community to the mix to represent the developers’ careful planning of the current and future amenities which include restaurants, shops, a school, a conservatory and garden, and even a bed and breakfast!

From here, we developed three goals for the project:

USER EXPERIENCE

Ultimately, we wanted site visitors to schedule a visit to see Acadia in person. Starting with the site architecture, we knew we needed to create an experience that would lead the user through the site, getting to know the community and planning a visit to see if Acadia would be the right fit. That started with simplifying the navigation and sitemap to three main pages: Explore, Visit, Build.

DESIGN

To achieve goals one and two, we wanted the natural beauty of the community to shine, so the site had to be incredibly easy to navigate and use beautiful graphics to help users immerse themselves in the community from the comfort of their couch. For goal 3, we knew all roads should lead to the Visit page.

Explore

As the primary vehicle to tell Acadia’s story, we created an Explore page that highlights all the unique values of the community: amenities, their careful masterplan, and their five planned neighborhoods. Using rich imagery, we featured their beautiful natural surroundings and green space. With the addition of a fixed content navigation bar and calls to action leading to the Visit page, the page is effortless to navigate and points users to plan a visit to Acadia.

Visit

Once users have discovered what makes Acadia so great, they’ll want to come it see for themselves. A visit to Acadia should be the destination for all users of the website, and the Visit page is their first step in getting there. We designed a beautiful form to schedule a tour and then let users know what to expect when they visit, including tour details, directions, travel times, and a custom map.

Build

To display Acadia’s beautiful architecture, their flexibility in homebuilding and budgets, and their design resources, we created a Build page. Stunning imagery of home interiors and exteriors pairs with information about Acadia’s building options, Design Center and Builder’s Guild to guide prospective buyers. With the addition of a fixed content navigation bar and calls to action leading to the Visit page, the page is effortless to navigate and points users to plan a visit to Acadia.

“I just wanted to thank you again so much for all of the hard work that you put in to our Acadia website. The final product has been simply stunning.”